A thread that, instead of responding to user requests, repeatedly selects a cached value according to some strategy, and recomputes that value from its inputs, in case the value had been inconsistent. Experimentation with a prototype showed that on a 16-core system with a 50/50 split between workers and fresheners, fewer than 2% of the queries would return an answer that had been stale for at least eight mean query times. These results suggest that tolerance of inconsistency can be an effective strategy in circumventing Amdahl’s law.